“Like peeling an endless onion, the more you peel, the more you peel.”
Galactic brain
Most physicists live under the assumption of a rigid, unalterable set of laws that govern the universe, but not all.
Theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma wrote at the outset The new column should be read new world vertical. These laws of physics are meant to describe our shared reality, although they “evolve as our empirical knowledge of the universe improves.”
“Here’s the problem,” Sarma continues. “Although many scientists consider it their role to discover these fundamental laws, I simply don’t believe they exist.”
Before Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking – and ultimately incomplete – attempts to create a The theory of everythingAnd with all the advances in fields like quantum mechanics that have followed, the physicist argues, such a claim wouldn’t have seemed so far-fetched.
Indeed, Sarma says she finds it “incredible” that humans “can understand some aspect of the universe through the laws of physics.”
“As we find out more about nature,” he writes, “we may improve our descriptions of it, but it is infinite.” “Like peeling an endless onion, the more you peel, the more you peel.”
Multiverse madness
Referring to a concept multiverseor an infinite number of universes, Sarma asks how humans can have such pride as to imagine that the apparent rules that seem to govern our reality will apply to all universes.
Raising a theoretical argument, Sarma adds that even faced with a fundamental theory like quantum mechanics, which he describes as “more like a set of rules that we use to express our laws than a final law in and of itself.” There are still too many mysteries and variations to hold this so-called basic theory sacred.
“It’s hard to imagine that in a thousand years physicists will still be using quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature,” he continues. “Something else must have replaced quantum mechanics by that point, just as quantum mechanics itself replaced Newtonian mechanics.”
What that alternative might be, Sarma refuses to speculate. Yet he sees no particular reason why our description of how the physical universe works should suddenly come to a head in the early 21st century and be stuck forever in quantum mechanics.
He adds: “That would be a really depressing idea!
More on physics: These headlines about scientists building a wormhole are complete nonsense, folks
